july 22–august 4, 2019 | new york 39would be staying in an apartment she
owned on Massachusetts Avenue, where
her graduate-student friend Haider had
been living with her longtime boyfriend,
Andrew Klein, who was moving out.
“Maria-Pia made it sound as though
she had scarcely ever been to Cambridge,”
he says. “She said she didn’t know the area
very well and didn’t really know anyone.”
Shuman explained that she’d purchased
the apartment as an investment and as a
place for Haider to live while she finished
her graduate work. She and Haider, she
told Hay, had been best friends since they
met as physics students their first year at
Imperial College in London. In a later
conversation that summer, Shuman
revealed that she and Haider were raising
the children together.
The unfolding revelations did little to
put off Hay, who says he was determined
to “take full responsibility for my actions.”
Throughout the summer of 2015, Hay
says, he and Shuman got together once or
twice a week for coffee or a meal and dis-
cussed rekindling their romance. But she
told him it was contingent on his telling
Zacks about their affair and the baby,
which he wasn’t yet willing to do.
They hadn’t been sexually involved
since their encounter at the Sheraton
Commander in April, but Shuman
could be effusive, telling him repeatedly
how much she loved him. Other times,
their exchanges were tense. In one
email, Shuman chastised him for not
making himself available to see her.
“I made arrangements with my nanny at
the last minute to help with the children
so I could come see you, and then called
you several times in your office with no
response,” she wrote. “You should be the
one providing support to me, not mis-
treating me and piling further stress
onto me. Today was the last time thatI am going to pander to your tantrums.”
Haider often loomed large in their con-
versations. Even as Shuman demanded
more of Hay’s time, she was cagey about
letting Hay meet the woman she called
her “soul sister.” When Hay asked about
her, he says, Shuman responded that
Haider was depressed and wasn’t up for
meeting new people. Two months before
the baby was due, Shuman finally
arranged for Hay and Haider to meet at a
diner in Watertown.
Shuman had told him that Haider was
weary of her physics program and
wanted to get more involved in trans
activism and write about trans issues.
“I thought, Maybe I could help?,” recalls
Hay. “She had been described to me as
this very exceptional person but down-
trodden, treated unfairly by her family
and by the world. By her body. By the
time I met Mischa, I had a protective
feeling for her.”
Their bond appeared instantaneous.
“We had similar political views,” he says.
“She told me a lot about the trans world.
I had known nothing about it.” Soon they
were getting together almost daily, talk-
ing for hours, sometimes meeting at a
coffee shop near Harvard called Dar-
win’s. Haider regularly texted and
emailed Hay articles and statistics about
trans women being brutalized and mur-
dered by men. Her communications
were often punctuated with a kind of fix-
ated anxiety about, if not expectation of,
being ridiculed, persecuted, and trauma-
tized for being trans—a rational terror,
to be sure. In 2015, according to the
Human Rights Campaign, at least
21 trans people were killed in the U.S.,
then the biggest number to date, a rate
that has since climbed.
Hay believed he’d identified a kindred
spirit in Haider, so he was sensitive to herHe and Zacks first met at
Harvard Law in 1987. They
married two years later and
had a son before separating
in the mid-’90s. After Hay
moved back in, they had two
more children together.
“Jennifer and I are the
opposite—she’s very skepti-
cal. And I’m very gullible,”
he says. When we met for
pizza at his Sunday-night
hangout one evening, he
wondered aloud whether he
might be “on the spectrum.”
That could help explain why warning
signs that might have been obvious to
many managed to elude a man who
teaches a Harvard Law class on “Judg-
ment and Decision-Making,” which ana-
lyzes those elements of human nature
that allow us to delude ourselves and
make terrible decisions. “Of course, now
I feel slightly ridiculous teaching it,” Hay
told me, “given how easily I let myself be
taken advantage of.”(^) S
ix weeks after they broke
off contact, Shuman called
Hay to tell him she was
pregnant with his baby. She
hadn’t had sex with another
man in the past year, she
said. Hay was stunned; he hadn’t ejacu-
lated during either of their encounters, a
side effect of his medication. But he un-
derstood that pregnancy was possible, if
rare, without orgasm. Shuman said she
was weighing whether to terminate the
pregnancy, then quickly followed up by
saying she’d made the decision to carry to
term—she was due in January.
Hay says she didn’t bring up money,
which didn’t surprise him because she’d
told him she owned two properties in
Paris that were worth millions, and later
she would tell him that her share of the
Mort Shuman Songs partnership was
worth some $25 million. He was more
surprised when he learned that Shuman
would be relocating to Cambridge that
summer. She told him in June that she
had purchased a three-bedroom mansard
Victorian, now valued at $1.9 million, on
a small side street in the Radcliffe neigh-
borhood less than a half-mile from his
house, and had brought her children over
from London. She wouldn’t be able to
move in until October, so she and her kids
“I’m going to write her and
detail the abuse you have done,
and explain how if they have any
decency they will fire you.”